A normal user's look into the world of 3D Stereo Technologies

It is not my first time writing about the lack of stereoscopic 3D versions of movie trailers for 3D movies online, so that everyone with some 3D-capable hardware will be able to get an idea about the stereo 3D effect provided by the movie before going to watch it in 3D. Maybe the reason is connected with that, since if you don’t like the volume effect in the trailer you might just go for the 2D version of the movie or not go and watch it at all, nobody cares if you don’t like the movie when you are already watching it in the theater, you’ve already payed for the ticket anyway. And considering the fact that still most of the 3D movies are 2D to 3D conversions and not shot with 3D cameras this can be somewhat of a concern. But at the same time you are presented with 3D movie trailers of upcoming titles when you go to the movie theater or get a Blu-ray 3D movie, so why not have these available online and reach much wider audience. I mean we already have platforms supporting 3D video streaming such as YouTube 3D that you can take advantage of in promoting the movie essentially for free, as you’d already probably have the 3D trailer ready anyway.

But no, Hollywood is still missing on this opportunity, others movie makers however seem to have noticed the extra potential that publishing not only 2D version of their trailers, but stereo 3D versions can also engage wider audience, especially the constantly growing number of people with some kind of a 3D-capable device. Some Japanese companies are already taking advantage of that opportunity, for example earlier this year one of the first officially published 3D trailer for a movie on YouTube was for “Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: Solid State Society 3D” and earlier this month another 3D movie trailer made its premiere on YouTube, one for the computer-animated movie “Tekken: Blood Vengeance (also embedded above). The interesting thing about those two movies is that they are computer generated animation with the first one being more interesting because of combining more traditional hand-drawn style of animation with computer generated cell-shaded graphics while the second is in more realistic style of 3D computer generated graphics. It seems however that animation is seeing some potential in using the stereoscopic 3D format for added benefit and that goes not only for the Japanese anime, but for western style of animation as well.

However it seems that we may still need to wait a bit more for live-action movies to start following this trend as well, especially the ones made in Hollywood. But there is one more important thing in regards to making a stereoscopic 3D trailer for a 3D movie and that is related to the way you usually make a trailer nowadays. When you watch a 2D movie trailer you usually get a lot of fast cuts from different scenes in the movie in order to make the action more dynamic and that usually works very well, but only in 2D. If you apply the same method of using a lot of fact cuts from different scenes with different depth and make that into a stereo 3D trailer, than the end result for the viewer watching it may as well turn to be unpleasant experience. One of the most important things that should not be done in a 3D movie trailer is to have a lot of very short scenes with big difference in the depth level stitched together in the trailer. Because our eyes need some time to readjust for the difference in the depth level in each scene and if you constantly vary the depth a lot each 2-3 seconds, the short 1-2 minute experience after watching the trailer might actually change your mind not to go and watch the movie in a movie theater. Even when the content in the trailer will most likely not always be the true representation of what is happening inside the actual movie, as it will most likely have longer scenes and easier transitions for the eyes of the audience. But still why is nobody in Hollywood even trying to do something about making available the 3D versions of the trailers for 3D movies, even if they are not made perfect right from the start… are they really afraid of loosing more of audience than they could attract this way?